Red Star Over China
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Remarkable woman's memory lives on
At midnight on April 30, 1937, a beautiful, 30-year-old American woman secretly climbed out the window of her room on the first floor of the Xijing Hotel in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. Once on the ground, she moved to the base of a wall facing the window. She stood on a pile of garbage and looked over it. A Kuomintang police patrol was marching toward the hotel. It would have been impossible at that moment to avoid the patrol, so she changed course and walked to the hotel entrance. She was surprised to find the door unlocked. Pushing it open, she encountered a policeman leaning against the wall, dozing off. Remarkable woman's memory lives on Photographer J.A. Piver asked to photograph Helen. He then put her picture in his window, saying she looked like actress Joan Bennett. Photos Provided to China Daily Remarkable woman's memory lives on Above left: Helen and Ed Snow were married in Tokyo, 1932; right: Ed's famous photo of Mao Zedong in Bao'an, 1936. Remarkable woman's memory lives on Helen snow (right) meets Wang Zhen in Xi'an in 1978. Wang was vice-premier at the time. Remarkable woman's memory lives on From left: Inside Red China, 1939; Red Star Over China, 1938; My China Years, 1984; My China Years, Chinese version. He mumbled, "Where are you going?" Calmly she answered in Chinese that she was going home and wondered if there was a rickshaw available. Coincidentally, one appeared. She stepped into the rickshaw, and the man pulling it took her quickly away. Six days had passed since she had arrived in Xi'an, traveling from what was then called Peking. She had been looking for a chance to escape from the city and evade the Kuomintang police but had failed. She was being closely watched on account her husband Edgar Snow, a world-famous journalist and writer, in whom the authorities were especially interested. Soon after she left the hotel, the rickshaw was narrowly missed by a man on bicycle. It was American Kempton Fitch, the son of George Fitch, head of the Young Men's Christian Association in China, who was a close friend of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of the KMT leader. Fitch and the woman had planned earlier that she would meet him after climbing the wall. He took her to his car, where they remained until dawn. Then, disguised as the severely ill son of a missionary, the woman, escorted by Fitch, escaped the Kuomintang soldiers and reached Sanyuan Town, which separated the so-called Red, or Communist Party, region from the White areas, which were held by the Kuomintang. There, two young Red Army soldiers came to meet them. Later that day, a new American car was sent to pick up the woman and take her to Yan'an, where she was to meet Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Liu Bocheng, Peng Dehuai, along with other officials, soldiers and ordinary people in Red China. It was probably one of the most thrilling days in the life of journalist and writer Helen Foster Snow, who later chronicled her adventure in Northwest China in books, including Inside Red China, published under the pen name Nym Wales. It was regarded as a sequel to Red Star Over China, written by her husband Edgar Snow. In 1936, Edgar went to Yan'an to interview officials of the Communist Party of China. Through his news reports and his book, which was published in London in 1937, Edgar became the first to introduce Mao Zedong and Red China to the world. His writings had such great impact that Helen was able to report to Mao, when she arrived in Yan'an a year later, that Edgar's verbal portrait of Mao, the legendary head of the "Red Bandits", had stunned the world, including Chiang Kai-shek. "Snow put a human face to the CPC and introduced the CPC leadership to an international and domestic Chinese audience," says John James Kennedy, associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas. The Snows sympathized with the Chinese people and both of them tried to take an objective stand. Through their diligent and professional work, the world got to know the leaders of the CPC. Many young Chinese, after reading the books and articles, left home and went to Yan'an, to join in the cause of building a new China. Now, as the wheels of history roll on, the memory of many figures, even many great ones who were worshipped in their lifetimes, are gradually fading. However, the Chinese traditionally try to remember those who offered their hand to the country in difficult times. American journalist and writer Helen Foster Snow is one of them. Compared with her husband, Edgar, the Chinese know little about this beautiful, passionate and brave woman. However, in recent years people have started paying more attention to her - notabley through symposiums such as those recently held in Xi'an and Beijing. Helen, who arrived in China in 1931, always cared about the country. As Paul Hyer, professor of Chinese history at Brigham Young University in the state of Utah, says: "In the bittersweet relations between China and America, the bridging work of a few Americans stands out. One of those was Utah's Helen Foster Snow." Helen was born into a family of intellectuals in Cedar City, Utah, in 1907. Remarkable woman's memory lives on "From her active, civic-minded, self-reliant, mother (Hannah David Foster), Helen learned many things," Hyer wrote in the introduction to the book Bridging: The Life of Helen Foster Snow. For instance, her mother, as a young woman, planned and supervised the building of a small house in the pioneering period of southern Idaho, just north of Utah. She was also a supporter of women's suffrage. From the age of 8, when she read The Wizard of Oz, Helen wanted to become a writer. At 15, she published her first poem, Li'l Ph'losophy on th' Spring. In An Interview with Myself, Helen wrote: "I had read Edith Wharton, who said that you have to stay abroad in a foreign country to get perspective before you can write about your own American experience. The contrast is what energizes your brain and talent. ... Nearly all Americans went to Paris." But compared with Paris, "China had more contrast and greater exchange to the dollar," she wrote. So in July 1931, she left Seattle, Washington, for Shanghai aboard the American Mail Line ship President Lincoln. Working as a secretary for the Consulate General of the United States in Shanghai, Helen one day asked about the news correspondent Edgar Snow, whom she had come to admire greatly through reading his China reports. They soon met and fell in love, and Edgar showed Helen around China. In Shanghai, they witnessed the "worst typhoon in years", the subsequent rush of refugees to the city and the disease epidemics that followed, aggravated by famine and the Japanese invasion. They took photos and wrote news reports for Western media to present a true picture of China. At that time, many news reports were about the easy life that most Western people enjoyed in the country, despite the misery of the native Chinese people surrounding them. After marrying at Christmas in 1932, the couple moved to Peking where Edgar had secured a job. With their love for China and their humanitarian streak, they helped students who, despite the Kuomintang's suppression, sought to resist the Japanese aggressors as part of the December 9th Movement in 1935. Helen wrote stories about these events and published a series of reports in Millard's Review for about six months. She also wrote articles for London's Daily Herald about the students' actions. Then, in 1936, Edgar learned that he might be able to enter northern Shaanxi province to have a look at Red China. Encouraged by Helen, he determined to make the trip with her to obtain firsthand material about a different China that had not yet been revealed to the world. Helen would describe herself as a truth seeker, and the adventure in Northwest China was a turning point in her life. From Yan'an in August 1936, Edgar wrote a letter to Helen in Peking that kindled his wife's passion to visit the place. That year, the Japanese army was speeding up its invasion of China, but the Kuomintang was still concentrating on exterminating the "Red Bandits". The Snows, having seen the misery the Chinese had suffered in the Japanese invasion, sympathized with the country and were worried about its future. Reading what her husband had seen and heard in Yan'an in his coded letter in September 1936, Helen, a passionate and adventurous woman, immediately determined to go to meet Edgar there. But it was harder for her to get into Yan'an than it had been for her husband. Helen arrived in Xi'an in late September. It was two months before the so-called Xi'an Incident involving the arrest of Generallissimo Chiang, who had been preparing to launch another military offensive against the Reds in northern Shaanxi. Although she was unable to go to Yan'an, Helen got a chance to interview Zhang Xueliang, Chiang's deputy commander-in-chief, publishing the scoop in the Daily Herald that predicted the Xi'an Incident 70 days later, in which Zhang and General Yang Hucheng, pacification commissioner of Shaanxi province, captured Chiang to demand that he stop the war against the CPC and unite the Chinese to fight the Japanese. In late October 1936, Edgar completed his more than three months of interviews in Yan'an and returned to Peking. Helen then started helping him sort out the material, type out the notes of interviews and print the photos that he had shot in northern Shaanxi. At her suggestion, Edgar did not rewrite the portrait of Mao Zedong, which was written in Mao's own words. Instead, he kept the first-person account, making it a classic. In early April 1937, when Edgar was still working on Red Star Over China, Helen learned that the CPC would hold a representative conference in Yan'an, and that members of the Party from around China would gather there. She regarded this as a perfect opportunity to visit the Red area. In late April, she arrived in Xi'an again, seeking a chance to enter northern Shaanxi. By that time, her husband's fame had spread, thanks to his exclusive reports on Yan'an. Helen was closely watched by the Kuomintang police. She tried several ways to get away but failed. In the end, she climbed out the window of her hotel room in the dark of night and joined her American friend Fitch. Helen then made her way to Yan'an, and interviewed many CPC officials whom her husband had not had a chance to meet, including Zhu De, who led the Second and Fourth Fronts of the Red Army on the Long March and had arrived in Yan'an later. She took photos and collected material not only for her own books - such as Inside Red China - but to provide supplementary material for Edgar's Red Star Over China, including the section about Zhu De. After their adventures in Northwest China, the couple left Peking after its occupation by the Japanese army, heading for Shanghai. In late 1937, Helen watched from the deck of the President Lincoln as Shanghai was burned by the Japanese. At least 80 percent of the city's factories and workshops were either destroyed or expropriated by the Japanese. There were crowds of refugees suffering all kinds of diseases and in rags, according to economist Gary Hansen, professor of management and human resources at Utah State University, in a speech in 1996. It was at the Medhurst Apartments in Shanghai that the Snows and their friend Rewi Alley initiated the idea of industrial cooperatives. "While seeking a way to help these people, Helen found the answer during a dinner table discussion in early 1938," Alley said. Alley recalled in his book China Remembers Edgar Snow that Helen said: "There must be a people's movement for production. ... Industrial cooperatives are the answer!" In the following seven years, under extremely difficult circumstances, nearly 2,000 industrial cooperatives employing over 300,000 people were systematically organized in China, Hansen said. At the end of 1940 and the beginning of 1941, the Snows left Shanghai for the United States. In 1949, they divorced. Edgar died in 1972. During 1972 and 1973, to finance a trip around the world that included a visit to China, Helen sold many of her antiques and memorabilia. To maintain her independence and credibility, she never accepted any outside financial support for her trips to China. In 1978, joined by a Hollywood film crew, Helen started a documentary project that included revisiting the places she had lived more than 40 years earlier. "Helen Snow is the most unique person that I ever met in my life," says Tim Considine, producer of the film. He visited China recently to attend symposiums about the Snows in Xi'an and Beijing. He shared stories about his trip with Helen to China in 1978. "She was so beautiful, lively, passionate and talented," he says. Considine accompanied Helen to meet Deng Xiaoping in 1979 when the leader visited the US. "In the US, no one knew her. But in China people really cared about her. I saw her flower bloom in China. The people and leaders like Deng Xiaoping were kind to her. I was happy to see her come to life, happy in China," he says. Based on those trips, she wrote and published An American Experience in China in Xi'an. In 1984, her book My China Years was published in New York. She continued to tell stories about China to the Western world. Helen died in 1997. "She will always be remembered for her profound love for the Chinese people, her understanding of China's history and her lifelong dedication and significant contribution to promoting friendship and understanding between our two peoples. In these respects she was an early bridge-builder and role model for younger generations. In a tribute, former vice-premier Huang Hua, his wife He Liliang and colleagues of the China Society for People's Friendship Societies said: "Her name will go down in the annals of Sino-US friendship and will always live in our hearts." In Cedar City, Utah, her hometown, a bronze statue of Helen Snow has been put up to honor the memory of a remarkable woman. yangyang@chinadaily.com.cn (China Daily Africa Weekly 10/28/2016 page1)
Interview: Harrison Salisbury's son retells untold stories on The Long March
PHILADELPHIA -- "Some day, someone will write the full epic of this exciting expedition," thus wrote Edgar Snow, on his pages of Red Star Over China, a historical account of the birth of Communist Party of China published in 1937. Snow never had the chance to write about the expedition in its entirety. That went to another American reporter, Harrison Salisbury, with his book titled The Long March: the Untold Story. The book was published in 1985, over 50 years after this turbulent part of history. "And 30 years later, it is still an in print, it is still read, it is still an incredibly exciting story," said Stephan Salisbury, son of the author, when Xinhua interviewed him in the year commemorating the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Long March. "A LIFELONG LOVE AFFAIR WITH THINGS CHINESE" "My father was interested in China since he was a small boy in Minneapolis Minnesota," Stephan said. At that time, there was one store in the city run by a Chinese immigrant, and it sold Chinese delicacies of all kinds, like candy ginger and caramelized lilac flowers, items that fascinated his father. "It kind of started a lifelong love affair with things Chinese," said Stephan. By the time Harrison went to college, he was convinced that he would become a reporter. It was then he had decided that he wanted to travel to China and report on events there. Harrison came of age during the time of the Russian Revolution and the first and second World Wars. "Anybody who was a reporter and was interested in the war would have to have an interest in the Soviet Union, the Communism, and the revolution," said Stephan. "That was sort of a background interest." Harrison Salisbury spent nearly 20 years with United Press, and later worked as the New York Times' Moscow bureau chief from 1949-1954. It was during this time that his interest in the Soviet Union and Communism was sparked. According to Stephan, Harrison knew and admired Edgar Snow, who interviewed Chairman Mao in the caves in Yan' an, the cradle of the Chinese Revolution. Snow wrote in his book that he hoped someone would be able to tell the story of the Long March in detail. "So my father got that idea, and once he got an idea, he couldn't let go of it, he kept pressing it," said Stephan. "He wrote letter after letter and importuned every official he could get his hands on, that he wanted to come to China, he wanted to take the Long March." In August 1983, word finally came from Beijing. The door to the Long March was open for Harrison. In March 1984, Harrison and his wife Charlotte flew to Beijing. A LIFETIME VENTURE From April to June 1984, the Salisbury couple travelled 7,500 miles by foot, by car, by minibus, by jeep, by horse, and by donkey, following the entire route of the Long March. "He did have a heart problem then, he had a pacemaker," Stephan says, recalling his father's health at the time. "What he suffered was what many of those in the Red Army suffered during the Long March due to lack of oxygen, over-exertion, dehydration," Stephan said. "Especially when he was that old, it can take a real toll." Harrison suffered a heart attack during an 11-mile footpath in the mountains to get to the Golden Sands River, where Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De miraculously crossed in 1935. Harrison' s heart was beating irregularly; fortunately though, the Chinese he was traveling with were able to get him to a hospital in Chengdu, where he recoverd. The route of the Long March remained elusive back in the 1980s, and the Salisburys were some of the first foreigners to explore it. Still, they managed to get a round of interviews with surviving senior generals, widows of Party figures, archivists and historians. "My stepmother was very reluctant to take this trip," said Stephan. "But in the end she said, it was a venture of a lifetime." And at the end of the trip, Harrison got the story he wanted, all the drama, the heroism, and the treachery, the human aspects of it, all contained in the book. "I think it is truly an epic," said Stephan of his father' s book. "So I think his lifelong dream of seeking to understand and report on China was completely fulfilled and beautifully so." "The story is an epic. Not only because of the heroism of the simple soldiers and their commanders but because it became, in effect, the crucible of the Chinese Revolution," Harrison writes in the preface to the book. "It forged the brotherhood that fought Chiang Kai-shek to a standstill and came to power under Mao' s leadership." THE STORY AS IT WAS The Long March: the Untold Story was published in 1985 during the Reagan years, toward the final years of the Soviet Union and turbulence in the East. "There could be many different views and many different political forces," recalled Stephan. "So you can' t have one mentality promoted by the government on the one hand, and a reporter that comes in with the very heroic story about the same people on the other." "The two don't go together." Still, the book received favorable reviews and was considered one of the great epics of human history. Harrison had a great influence on his son, who later became a reporter too, with the Philadelphia Inquirer. "His example is something I can't ignore," said Stephan. And there were lessons from his father about getting the right story. "If you persist, and you are open, you are straightforward with people - "this is what I want to do, I want to tell your story, I don't want to impose my story on you ..." Then ultimately, if you are fortunate, they will believe you. You can get the story."
Hat worn by Mao in famous Snow photo on display
During his four-month stay in Yan'an in Northwest China's Shaanxi province in 1936, American journalist Edgar Snow took one of the most iconic photos of Mao Zedong, the founding father of New China. It showed the late leader in a Red Army hat that featured a red star at the center of its front face. Snow was then conducting interviews with top leaders of the Communist Party of China, following the Red Army's completion of the Long March. The Communists bega'n a two-year strategic retreat in 1934 to evade capture by Kuomintang forces. The hat Mao wore in the photo was borrowed from Snow. He had received it as a gift along with a Red Army uniform when he arrived at the revolutionary base in July 1936. Snow had kept the hat through his life. After his death in 1972, his family sent it to China; it is now part of a collection at the National Museum of China in Beijing. Hat worn by Mao in famous Snow photo on display The museum also boasts an initial edition of Red Star Over China published in London in 1937. The book became Snow's best-known account of his time in Yan'an, and has been reprinted in dozens of languages since. The hat and the book are among some 300 items from the museum's collection that are now being shown at an exhibition, titled Belief, Spirit, Inheritance. It marks the 80th anniversary of the completion of the Long March. Also on display are slogans written on wooden boards, military maps, comic books, letters and artworks, reflecting the Communist soldiers' discipline and willingness to sacrifice for the nation. "The Red Army believed faithfully that 'revolutionary ideals higher than the sky'. They put this into practice by liberating the oppressed, who in return helped to spread the shared thoughts," says Jiang Lin, a curator at the museum. Hat worn by Mao in famous Snow photo on display The ongoing exhibition shows dozens of posters and notices that the Red Army distributed during the march. Through them, the Party communicated to the people its goals and policies. The manuscript Lovely China has moved many viewers. Red Army division commander Fang Zhimin wrote the piece to express his longing for China's better future when he was imprisoned by the Kuomintang in 1935. Fang was later executed at the age 36. He wrote that the country would boast dynamic inventions and daily progress in the future where "joy replaces sadness, prosperity replaces poverty ... enchanting gardens replace the wasteland". Jiang, the curator, says the exhibition also celebrates brotherhood, which was a Long March value. The Party leaders and soldiers supported one another while encountering difficulties during the march. The testaments on show include a woolen blanket given to a wounded soldier by Wu Huan, an army officer who died in battle at the age of 28, and an oil lamp which Lin Boqu, a high-ranking Party member, often used to light rough paths for soldiers. Lin, who was 48 when the Long March began, had a horse which he seldom rode that he gave to soldiers to carry supplies. A glass eyecup that's exhibited was one of the devices military doctor Fu Lianzhang used to treat soldiers during the march. Fu, who was working at a Christian hospital before the march, became a Communist and trained soldiers in basic medical treatments. (China Daily USA 10/11/2016 page10)
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 Yes, Red Star Over China, which be called classic.
2 He had been to Switzerland to see Edgar Snow, whose famous book Red Star Over China chronicles his unique experiences with Mao and his revolutionaries in Yenan.
3 Edgar Snow, a journalist from the United States who spent months with the Red Army in the northwest and later wrote Red Star over China, the definitive account of the CPC's travails at the time.